Well, I was really hoping someone had a suggestion for me here. What I ended up doing was creating an outer table, and, for rows that had vertically spanning cells, I used only one row, merged all cells horizontally that didn't span vertically, and placed tables with as many rows as I needed so that the one cell which in the report spans vertically is represented by a single cell in the outer table, but the inner tables make it look like to its right and left there are two to three rows associated with it. I was able to do this because of the fact this is a statically defined table, always the same height, and the decision had already been made (not my decision) to make separate datasets for each row of the table.

So that works. Each row of the table makes a string reference to First() of the dataset it's using (since there's only one row returned from any of these datasets, that's fine). The web rendering is much better in this case than without the outer table.

Now I'm running into alignment issues within the table defined. Any table that has tables inside of it has rows in the web rendering that push out further to the right and those that push out a few pixels less to the right. Turns out that it's the rows that weren't merged and fitted with inner tables that are slightly wider than those that were.

Also, for those rows that were merged and fitted with an inner table, their columns in the web rendering push down a pixel or so less than those that weren't.

I've been able to reduce some of these differences by turning off some borders. Wherever, in the line of extra growth, I see two cells sharing an inner border (a light gray border inside the table boundaries) I choose one of them to turn off. Turns out that turning off the one in the cell belonging to the inner table seems to be the better choice.

This has helped some too, but now I have some gaps in the web rendering between cells where the border from the adjacent cell doesn't quite reach and touch this cell's border. And there's still some extra growth in rows mostly, but also in columns.

Quite maddening this. I continue to look at it, but I'm not really sure how to fix it. Any ideas guys? Right now I need a miracle to fix this thing.

P.S. - the print rendering continues to be perfectly ok.